Weight of the World
by LadySilver
Summary: A series of unrelated ficlets and prompts written for Angst Bingo Round 4.
1. Negative Spaces

Summary: It's not just about finding a place to sit.

Characters: Boyd

Warnings: None**  
**

**Negative Spaces**

Boyd was used to the way his presence changed the space around him. He knew how his classmates would take an extra step back when he walked down the hall and and how they would scoot their desks a few inches further away when he sat down. He wasn't ignorant of the way people turned away when he approached or the way their conversations cut off when they realized he could hear. He knew it wasn't right, and some days he allowed himself to feel the anger that simmered.

Mostly, he didn't bother.

His first growth spurt in seventh grade had left him towering over his classmates and had cursed him with the power to cause fear by existing. Eventually, he got used to how it was. He couldn't shrink, couldn't lose his natural girth, couldn't lighten his skin. Wouldn't, anyway.

It was a different blow that tore at his soul and it came with the simple act of eating lunch. Every day he gathered his cafeteria tray, and swept his eyes over the rapidly filling tables in painful hope that there'd be a space for him. Without fail, he saw pairs and groups of people sitting down together without anyone first asking "Can I sit here?" He saw hands waving in the air as someone who was never him was summoned to a saved seat.

He saw the division of tables: the computer nerds with their laptops out and headphones in, the drama geeks with their black t-shirts and trench coats, the popular kids with their sneers and attitude coronas. The jocks owned adjacent tables where they mock wrestled and tossed food around like none of them had ever gone to bed hungry.

No one saw him.

Inevitably, his breath rushed out of him and his shoulders sagged. "You need to put yourself out there," his mama said, each time he tried to tell her how it was. "Once they get to know you…."

His mama was wrong.

When he put himself out there, everyone at the table always and simultaneously had someplace else to be.

God's gifts to him hadn't included coordination or speed; computer games bored him in their pointlessness; and he'd never thought much of reciting lines that others had written. He was reminded with every set of eyes that tracked him to make sure he kept right on walking that what he liked, what he had to offer wasn't enough.

By unspoken assignment, he had been relegated to his own, empty table. He would sit with his back to the wall and stare out at the room where backpacks perched on seats between people who were friendly enough when he was handing them ice-skates.

Every morning, the anticipation of lunchtime twisted up his stomach and tightened his fists until his fingernails dug into his palms, yet he was never quite able to remember how bad it really was until he was here again, breathless and eyes stinging, his sense of space becoming ever more distorted.

END

_A/N: For angst bingo prompt: exile_


	2. Breathing Room

Summary: All a person needs is a chance to catch her breath.

Characters: Melissa, Scott

Warnings: Sick child

**Breathing Room**

The harsh racks of Scott's coughing awoke Melissa at the end of a day tainted with a sense of wrongness and foreboding. She was halfway to his room before she recognized that this was no ordinary asthma attack, even by Scott's standards. A dampness underscoring each hack sent a shiver down her spine. She touched her son's burning forehead, eyed his violently shivering body, and reached for the nebulizer with one hand and the phone with the other.

Scott's tenth birthday came and went. Melissa had wanted to throw a party for him, just a small one to help him keep his spirits up since he'd missed so much school. He relapsed that week. Melissa and her husband—she could still think of him as her husband at this point—had their first fight outside Scott's hospital room door, voices crushed into whispers as they argued about the flavor of his birthday cake instead of what they wanted to say.

Melissa left Scott's present—a PlayStation that no one was going to convince her that the McCalls couldn't afford—on his dresser for when he felt well enough to play it. He didn't touch it for eleven days.

The Stilinskis dropped off a selection of games; Deputy Stilinski curled Melissa's fingers around the cheerfully wrapped boxes and informed her that the gift was the least they could do. Her throat choked up and she nodded, knowing it was true because Mrs. Stilinski had spent more time sitting vigil with her than anyone else.

The fourth grade class that Scott was supposed to be in sent a card made of poster board. Scott's classmates had scribbled it full of platitudes and scrawled signatures. She wondered bitterly how many of them would have known it was his birthday if he'd been in school that day. She hoped they would remember his eleventh birthday, refused to consider that there might not be an eleventh birthday for them to forget.

Scott had wires and drips and machines that filled his hospital room with beeps and buzzing and the metallic taste of hope that she couldn't bear to swallow. She knew what every single machine and tube did, and yet she had never felt so helpless.

Any spare moment Melissa could grab during her shifts over the next few weeks she came into her son's room and watched him, seeking signs of improvement that weren't wishful thinking. He'd always been a scrawny child. Now he was sprawled beneath the white sheets, nearly fading into the bed. His chest rose and fell with labored effort. She had to force herself to listen past the thick gurgle under each inhalation and instead concentrate on how the latest fever had broken and on how the persistent coughing showed signs of subsiding.

The doctors acknowledged that Scott's body wasn't responding well to treatment; they said he'd have to fight through on his own. Thinking about how stubborn her son could be made Melissa start laughing at random times, the rough sounds jerking out of her throat on their own volition. Scott's father grew increasingly short-tempered at what he told her a blatant disrespect for her calling, her child, and her family.

The illness wouldn't let go.

Scott came home for a few days around Halloween. Too lethargic to participate any other way, he sat on the front porch in his pirate costume and handed out candy.

Two weeks later he was back in the hospital for observation, a series of severe asthma attacks scaring everyone. Every conversation Melissa could recall with Scott's father from that that time was limited to terse exchanges of information and suffocating anger as each complained of how much more the other should be doing.

Christmas passed, then New Year's. Scott was home for some of it, his father for less.

More than three months after the ordeal started, Melissa found herself staring at the stack of letters piled on the kitchen table. So many were bills from the hospital, the insurance companies, the pharmacy: contradictory and confusing statements about who would pay for what and how much. She'd been in healthcare for her entire adult life and still found the numbers shocking. Less surprising was the petition for divorce that had appeared on the table that morning.

Melissa pressed the papers flat against the wooden table, closed her eyes, listened hard. Scott was asleep on the couch in the next room, the television droning in the background. Over the murmured voices she could hear Scott's breathing, deep and even, each inhalation dry and effortless for the first time in too long. He was still weak, had missed most of the school year and would be missing more while he recovered.

She swallowed.

As long as she could hear him, she could handle the rest.

END

_A/N: The subtitle for this piece is "Or, Why Scott Didn't Remember the Hale House Fire."_

_A/N: For angst bingo prompt: pneumonia  
_


	3. In Her Eyes

Title: In Her Eyes

Characters: Scott McCall, Melissa McCall

Rating: PG

Summary: Scott understands what the look in his mother's eyes means.

Notes: Reaction!fic. **Spoilers for 2x10**, for angst bingo prompt: failure

In Her Eyes

The look on his mother's face as she backed into the shadows of the jail cell communicated everything more clearly than any words she could have chosen. Her hands were over her mouth, holding back the screams that he knew would wake her up with nightmares for the rest of her life. He'd shown her his face—his other face—and she had backed away. Her "Scott, Scott, baby, are you okay?" vanished, and all he could see in her expression now was horror and fear as she saw his yellow eyes and the stranger he had become.

Scott felt his strength drain out of him, his shoulders slumping, his knees weakening. He cast his gaze down because he had nothing to offer her that would help. She had told him that women loved words, and he had none to offer her. No words, no assurances, not even a platitude (it's not as bad as it looks). His hands were stained with blood. His shirt was soaked with blood from a wound that had already healed (how easy it was for that wound to heal while this new one ripped open wider and wider). He was a werewolf-he'd always _be _a werewolf—and his mother had finally seen him for what he really was: a failure of a son.

Everything he'd done had been to protect her, every assumption he hadn't corrected (he never lied _to_ her, even in those times when any other kid would _Are you on drugs? / Right now? / Don't you care that there's a curfew? / Not really. / Are you okay? / I'm fine._), every late night and broken promise, and she'd finally seen why, and it (hadn't been enough) (been too much.)

He could feel his world crashing down. All that was left in the rubble was a little boy who could no longer even pretend to be the son his mother had raised. She'd seen his face, and with that he had taken everything from her. Any illusion he'd been able to build, to maintain, to feed (that he was normal that his problems were hers to help solve that he could fulfill any of the dreams that she had for him) was gone now.

No parent dreamed of her child growing up to be a monster, and that wasn't what she had raised. It _wasn't._ (But it's what he was) and she'd seen the truth. He had tried so hard to let her hang on to him even as he others worked to pull him away, and he'd failed.

He could rip the bars off the cell doors and force her to confront him, but he couldn't do that to her. She had backed away, so all he could do was turn away, try to refocus. The other monsters were still out there and he has to stop (save) them and it wouldn't matter because he had heard her pleading "No, no" and seen the look in her eyes.

END


	4. Black as the Stars We Cannot Find

**Pairing:** Lydia/Jackson

**Rating: **K+

**Word Count: **727

**Notes: **Spoilers for season 2, written for the "Sharpen Your Claws" challenge on travel_in_packs, based on the prompt: _So here's my confession / This time, this time / Don't just want you to love me / I want to be your obsession. _Title is mangled from the _Shriekback _song "Sticky Jazz." Also for angst bingo prompt: betrayal.

**Summary: **Lydia calls Jackson out on how he's been treating her.

**Black as the Stars We Cannot Find**

Lydia uses the key to let herself into Jackson's house that night. She finds him in the entrance, staring into the darkened interior as if waiting for an invitation to proceed. His parents are out of town. They were gone for the weekend. They never knew how he had been carted off the lacrosse field in a body bag, nor how he had arisen from the dead. They never knew how close they came to losing him, and Lydia suspects that Jackson was prepared to stand in that hallway until they called out to him.

At her step, he turns, his body first, then his head. His arms start to spread, then stop, another invitation half-invoked. The clacking of her shoes against the tile floor echoes, and she takes four steps and slaps him across the face. His head drops, one hand coming up to rub at his cheek. "I deserved that," he says. His brashness is gone, shut down for lack of audience. All that's showing now is the vulnerability that he works so hard to deny, except when she's around.

"You don't get to treat me like that," she responds. Her hands are clenched at her sides, tiny fists pressing against fabric that still carries the chill of night air. "No one gets to treat me like that, but most of all, _you _don't. I thought I meant more to you." It's not really a question, only maybe it is. She's looking for an affirmation of some kind. She has so many questions about what she saw, and so many pieces of things she _almost_ remembers that only raise more questions. All she knows for sure is that Jackson needs her to be human, and she knew that all along.

His head drops lower and he wilts toward her. His clothes are bloodied and torn; a smudge of something black mars his perfect cheekbones. "You do," he replies.

And all she can think of is how he pushed her away, how he chopped himself out of her life and then mocked her for the hole that was left open. The nasty things he had said haunt the edges of her thoughts and she wonders how many sweet whispers it will take to cover them up. For as terrible as he could be to other people, she'd never thought he could hurt her. _Would_ hurt her. "You're going to have to earn forgiveness," she tells him.

He gnaws on his lip, his eyes flicking up to look at her through the brace of lashes. "I killed people."

Her breath catches because it's one more thing she didn't know, one more piece of evidence for how much he needed her. Jackson's flaws run deep, but the ability to murder….? She shakes her head; strands of loose hair tickle the sides of her face.

She reaches out to touch him, and he only flinches back a little. His skin is warm under her touch and faintly sticky from dried sweat. "That wasn't you," she asserts, and she doesn't know how she's so sure of that, except that she knows Jackson better than anyone. She always has, and maybe that's why it hurt so much when he set off on his own. Look at what that had led to?

For weeks, they had been contributing to their own destructions, and now it was over. In tearing themselves apart, they had smashed back together. "You have a lot of penance to pay for the thing that committed those crimes," she adds thoughtfully, "but the real Jackson, the one inside here—" she taps his chest over his heart to emphasize her point—"isn't guilty. Of that."

Lydia frowns slightly because what happened is so much more complicated, and Jackson is certainly not blameless. She decides to let it pass; enough has already happened tonight.

Jackson leans forward as if to kiss her, and Lydia lets his lips graze her cheek. "You still owe _me_," she replies to his questioning look, and she spins him around and pushes him toward the stairs, at the top of which he'll find a shower and a bed and, with luck, some peaceful sleep that he desperately needs. Because, tomorrow, in the clear light of day, she and Jackson will begin to rebuild, and while her love saved him tonight, her price has gone up.

END


	5. Obliviate

**Characters:** Adrian Harris, Laura Hale

**Word Count: **2590

**Rating:** K+

**Summary:** Adrian Harris has monsters. Laura Hale might be one of them.

**Notes:** For angst bingo prompt: insomnia and h/c bingo prompt: substance addiction

**Warnings: **Alcoholism

**Obliviate**

The shadows have claws and fangs, and they slink across the walls like thick smoke.

Adrian knows that they're stalking him, closing in around him, until that moment when they decide to pounce. He watches them at night, the lights he leaves on only barely able to hold the shadows at bay. He can't sleep with the lights on, so he sits in his bed, alone in his house, and watches the shadows skulking in the corners.

His fingers curl endlessly around the neck of a bottle, any bottle; he stopped being selective long before all the trouble began and he has no incentive to go back now. He drinks until he passes out, because the truth is that he can't sleep with the lights out, either.

He can't sleep because knows that monsters all come out at night, and he's way overdue for a visit.

He can't imagine what they're waiting for. A part of him wishes that they would just get it over with. It's been years since the fire, years that the monsters have made him wait. He knows they blame him, though certainly not more than he blames himself.

He tells anyone who knew him then that he's stopped drinking, that the fire and sobriety are unrelated. Two lies are better than one. People almost always get so wrapped up in believing one that they fail to notice the weaknesses in the other. He can fake sober during the day. If his coffee is a little bit Irish, it's merely to help him make it through.

The shakes only hit him when dusk falls and the shadows start to prowl. The other part of him—the part that doesn't want to die—wishes the monsters would leave him alone, because the arson was his information, not his idea or doing, and he doesn't deserve to dream of people screaming, of people being burned alive, of children dying. He hears their screams anyway, always on the edges of his thoughts. They get louder when he climbs into bed, and louder still as he stares at the wall across the room and the fine cracks in the eggshell paint as the stars spin across the sky.

He wants to fall asleep peacefully and wake up gently.

Only, the very notion of _sleep_ has come to seem more mythical than people who change their shape, beings whom he helped kill because one night at a bar—one night like every other night—he spoke to a pretty woman. He should have learned his lesson then.

Adrian lifts the bottle to his lips and tilts it back. The alcohol sloshes from the nearly empty bottle, a dribble spilling down his face and onto his shirt. He hears a tree branch scraping above his window and shudders, sucking in more of the alcohol to quiet his nerves. His skin is damp with a thin layer of sweat and his vision blurry. He watches the corners, waiting for the claws to creep toward him. He knows this is the night, though he's known that for six years and been wrong every time. That doesn't challenge his certainty now.

The doorbell rings.

He jumps. An arm flails out in reflex and knocks the clock next to his bed onto the floor with a loud crash. Staring at the shattered plastic for a long moment, he tries to figure out how it got on the floor and if he's supposed to pick it up. He decides not to. If the clock is on the floor, he figures, it must have a reason. Besides, getting out of bed is dangerous. Hugging the bottle closer, he slides down under the covers as if he were a child and the thin cotton sheets were enough to protect him.

The doorbell rings again, a persistent noise booming through his house. A loud knocking follows.

"G'away," he murmurs, his voice slurred. "Not home."

There's silence.

He listens carefully for any hint of breathing or footsteps, any sign that the person or thing has let itself in. He hears a rattle like a door handle being tested, but no follow-up squeak of hinges or thunk of steps across the wooden floor. The branch continues to scrape. His pulse thumps loudly in his ears, irregular and rapid.

"'one's home," he repeats, his voice glancing off the inside of the bottle.

The doorbell starts to ring again, insistent, without pause. He can't stand it. Adrian stumbles to his feet and down the hall, knowing that each step is a terrible idea and yet continuing because if he doesn't, the tocsin won't stop. There's a small smoked glass window in the door. It shows him nothing. The last of the courage from the bottle bolsters him and he opens the door. His porch is dark, the light next to the door out. All he can see is shadows. He blinks, rubs his eyes, starts to shut the door. The shadow stops him, its eyes red and teeth glistening, strong claws clicking against the door that it easily pushes open against his efforts. It speaks.

He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to draw backward to safety and light and a time when no one cared what he had to say. His hand falls off the knob and he can feel a breeze from the door swinging open all the way, exposing the inside of his house like a turtle rolling on its back.

"Don't worry. I'm not going to hurt you, Mr. Harris. I'm sorry to have scared you," the monster says, and Adrian wonders briefly at its ability to form sentences before deciding that he must be hallucinating. Nevertheless, the words sound sincere, and Adrian wants to believe them, but he knows better. He knows that his time is up and it's here to make it happen. A shiver runs up his spine and lodges itself at the base of his head, every inch of his skin tightening into goose bumps.

"Leave me alone. I didn't do anything," he whispers, still backing away. The floor is uneven beneath his feet and the walls keep canting toward him and away. He'll never be able to move fast enough to get away.

The monster's only response is a low growl of disagreement, though later Adrian wonders if that's what he heard or if that's what he wanted to hear.

"I know what you are," he blurts out, and it's probably the worst thing he could say. Even in his current state, he knows better than to let the monsters know he can see them. His mouth tastes sour and dry. He needs a drink. His hands start to shake and he clenches them into fists that he presses hard against his thighs. The cloth of his slacks is limp from excess wearing and damp from the earlier spill. If he were sober, he'd be embarrassed. He's not afraid, he tells himself, instead. _I'm not afraid._

_I'm not the one you need to be afraid of_, the monster utters.

This time, he knows he heard language. He opens his eyes and blinks blearily at the figure before him. Though the bisecting line of his bifocals, he notes that the fur has receded, the maw has gone, and a person stands before him. A woman. Her hair is dark, like night. As her face comes into focus, he gasps. Her eyes are hazel and heavy with grief. He'd recognize them anywhere. God knows he saw them rolling in boredom often enough from the front seat of his classroom.

"Laura."

She nods slightly in acknowledgement, then holds something out to him. It turns out to be the empty bottle. A large crack runs from its base. He must have dropped it, though he doesn't remember when. "All I want is information," she adds. She's wearing jeans and a black windbreaker somehow, yet he could swear the monster had only fur. "I promise I'm not going to hurt you. Enough people have already been hurt."

"I don't know anything," he says, the lie even more sour in his mouth than the aftereffects of his bender. He's tried to convince himself of this for so long and has never been able to manage it for more than a few minutes at a time. This is not one of those times. "I didn't do anything," he repeats, always hoping that it'll become true if he says it enough.

"That makes us even, then," she replies. She doesn't elaborate; he doesn't need her to. He reaches reflexively for the bottle she's holding as if it still contains anything worth drinking, as if he could make one more attempt to crawl into it for good. She stops him with a gentle hand and a shake of her head. Her skin is cool, fingernails filed into round tips, not at all like the claws that reach for him every night. "You don't look so good," she adds, and she pushes all the way into his house, closing the door behind her as if she had been invited.

Adrian whips his head around, searching for another way out, unable to recall the layout of his own home. The hallway behind him is all darkness with strange, hulking shadows that have crawled from the nightmares he doesn't have. The sudden movement and a new bout of terror brings on a wave of dizziness, and the ceiling begins to slope toward him and his stomach begins to fall out like he's just topped the peak of a rollercoaster.

Laura catches him before he hits the floor and carries him to the couch. He thinks he should be embarrassed, but the thought can't crawl far enough from the muddle in his head to get acted upon. "Sit here," she says. "Let me get you something to drink."

The quavering in his hands has started to spread to his legs and his body prickles like sparks are burning his skin. "Thank God," he replies, slumping into the cushions. Except, the cold glass she pushes into his hands a few moments later turns out to be only water. He drinks it anyway, the ice banging against his lips and crunching between his teeth. The room is shrouded in darkness, the curtains fully drawn against any outside light. For the first time, he doesn't find himself scrabbling for a light switch, doesn't feel his heart racing.

"You know what happened," she says. It's not a question. She kneels in front of him, her long hair swinging in front of her face. The haunted look in her eyes bores into him and for once he's glad for his inability to sleep, or he'd have to face that expression in his dreams for the rest of his life. "You know who destroyed my family."

"I don't know anything," he says for the third time, then sighs. It's still not true.

"Whoever set our house on fire? I think they've come back to finish the job," Laura explains. She's starting to sound frantic and nervous, as if she expects the shadows to leap off the walls and tear into her. How strange, Adrian thinks, that _she'd_ be afraid of the things that stalk through the darkness when he's not. How poorly that bodes for him and his survival instincts. "I need to know who they are."

Adrian shakes his head, a poor decision if ever he'd made one. The ice water has settled hard between his eyes, and he pinches his nose trying to contain the ache. "Why come to me?"

"You talk too much when you've been drinking," she answers. She frowns, her forehead and corners of her mouth drawing into creases well beyond her years, and tilts her head briefly as if listening to something.

The ambiguity in her answer confuses him. He starts to stand up. There's a small bar on the far wall, an old buffet cabinet that he'd converted for more salient use. "I need a real drink," he says. Some bourbon would be nice. He needs to clear his head, and water isn't the answer.

Laura pushes him back down with barely a touch. _You've had enough to drink, _her gesture insists. He doesn't agree, but he doesn't fight her either. He thinks he can wait until she leaves.

"Please help me," she begs. Her attention is fully on him again, yet her body is coiled as if preparing to bolt.

Adrian wraps his hands tighter around the glass. His eyes flick to where the bar is located, though he can't see it without the light on, and he imagines the burn of whiskey in his mouth. One thought bleeds into another, and he thinks he smells smoke. Its odor is faint but distinct. He sees Laura in front of him, older than she should have been. The weight of tragedy is heavy on her shoulders. "There is one thing," he tells her. "She had a necklace." He reaches for the pad of paper that he keeps on the end table next to the phone and sketches the engraving he saw. "I never asked for her name and she never volunteered it."

Laura accepts the drawing and studies it, though how she can see anything he doesn't know. Except, he does know. He does, and he's going to do everything in his power to forget as soon as he can. "Thank you," she says, standing up. She hesitates, the paper clenched in her fist. "Are you sure you don't remember anything else?"

"She was pretty," he adds. "She was so pretty that I didn't see how ugly she really was." He says it like an excuse, though it's meant to be a statement of fact. Or maybe it's the other way around. However Laura hears it, she only nods.

She scribbles something on another piece of paper. "If you think of anything else, call me," she insists, handing him the paper. He sees a square of white—all that his eyes can register—and assumes that what she wrote was a phone number. He nods and she thanks him again, then leaves.

As soon as she's gone, he drops the paper to the table. Eager to discard the water glass, he sets it on the makeshift coaster, giving no thought to what effect that'll have. Only one thing concerns him right now. He stands up and wobbles across the room. He walks straight into the buffet cabinet with enough force to make the decanters on it clatter and a bruise sprout on his hip, and pours himself one drink, then another. The rest of the bottle makes an uncertain trip back to the couch. He sinks back into the cushions and swallows back a gulp that makes lightning flicker behind his eyes.

With each flash, he turns over what Laura said, dissects how she looked and the way she acted. He hears screaming at the edge of his consciousness and sees again the depth of pain held in her eyes. She promised not to hurt him, but he knows how fragile that promise will be. She, too, has claws and fangs, and a darkness that is swallowing her whole. Soon enough, she'll return.

Adrian draws his knees up, pulling his ankles out of reach of whatever could swipe at him from under the furniture, and takes another drink. The tremors slowly ease and the tightness lessens. The alcohol helps, but it won't be enough. He won't sleep tonight, because he can't sleep when the shadows stretch, reaching for him, always smelling of smoke.


	6. Killjoy

**Characters: **Allison Argent, Victoria Argent, Chris Argent

**Rating: **K+

**Word Count: **1500

**Notes: **For angst bingo prompt: _first time_

**Killjoy**_  
_

An overheard conversation gelled for Allison the endgame of her training.

Dinner had been a silent affair with her parents glaring at each other over the broasted duck while her grandfather praised his skill in the kitchen—a praise that somehow seemed intended to demean everyone else-, and only thoughts of Scott and the way he _looked_ at her at helped her make it through the meal without exploding in anger and frustration.

Every night was the same thing: tension, disagreement, aggression masquerading as politeness. When anyone spoke to her, it was to give orders or reprimands, always with the hint that she wasn't old enough to know what she wanted.

Since they had moved to Beacon Hills, her parents treated her as a pawn or a tool or an obstacle, but almost never as a person. Only when she was with Scott did she remember how personhood felt, and remember how good it felt, to be recognized for who she was rather than what purpose she could serve.

By the time she finished cleaning up, her parents had relocated to the living room while her grandfather went outside for a stroll. As she walked toward the open doorway, she could hear the clinking of glassware and the strained hush of their voices. They were sharing an after dinner drink and a conversation laced with an urgency that brought chills to her spine. Lately, whenever her parents spoke like this, someone she loved got hurt.

"…Scott…" she heard her mother say. His name jumped out, and Allison gave in to the urge to stop and listen when the polite and proper response would have been to keep going. She stood as close to the doorframe as she dared, her shoulder pressed to the wall, and tried to make herself invisible.

Her father had only started her formal training a couple weeks before, and so far the activities had focused on the physical, building on the groundwork he'd been laying her whole life with archery and gymnastics. He'd also handed her a stack of books to read, most of which she couldn't get more than a couple pages through at a time without rolling her eyes at what she felt were completely hyperbolic descriptions of werewolves and their depravities. Only one of the werewolves she knew had seemed capable of what the books described, and he hadn't exactly been acting without cause.

"You saw how that worked for Kate," her father replied to whatever it was her mother had said. The couch shifted, and Allison could hear him stand up. She could imagine him standing before the fireplace with his glass raised as a focus for his contemplation.

"Yes, we _all_ saw what happened there," her mother spoke. "It can't be allowed to happen that way again. The traditions exist for a _reason_."

Her father's footsteps sounded over the wood floorboards as he paced to the fireplace and back. "Traditions be damned," he spat. "I will not allow…" He must have turned; his next words were lost or swallowed.

Allison scrunched closer, pulling her long hair back with one hand both to make sure her ears were unobstructed and so it wouldn't accidentally swing into the open and give her presence away.

"It's not your decision," her mother bit out.

A thunk resounded, the glass landing on the table so hard that Allison was surprised it didn't shatter. "I'm still her father and I say we find a different way. We want to train her, not destroy her."

The room dropped into tense silence and Allison caught her breath, easing her exhalation out her nose as quietly as possible. Her stomach fluttered. She didn't want to imagine how they thought Scott should factor into her training, though suspicions whirled in the back of her mind. Her parents knew how she felt about him; anyone who didn't know wasn't paying attention. He'd been her first boyfriend and first kiss, first real date and first heartbreak.

They didn't know he had been her first _everything._

"Scott," she heard her mother repeat. And it wasn't a question, merely a statement of unwavering fact at how important Scott was. As if she knew.

But she couldn't know. Allison hadn't been able to work up the nerve to talk to her mother about birth control, so as far as she knew, her parents believed that she and Scott weren't _that_ serious yet. Never mind that they had been _that_ serious that afternoon, taking advantage of some unsupervised time in between school letting out and Mrs. McCall arriving home.

A warm grin spread across her lips as she thought about how Scott's hands felt as they roamed her body, his touch insistent but always moving, as if he would burn her if he kept his hands in one place too long. His lips, by comparison, were cool as they nibbled trails up her neck and down her shoulders. He loved her neck and could spend long minutes nosing her pressure points and mouthing her pulse. The sense memory of his lips on her skin sent a pleasant shiver through her body, followed almost immediately with a flush of embarrassment at how easily her thoughts had gotten derailed.

And, boy, had she gotten derailed. While her thoughts had wandered to the more pleasant, her parents had stopped talking. She had completely missed her father's response—if there'd been one.

She recognized their silence as one of two players conniving to out maneuver the other. She didn't trust it, didn't trust them. They were plotting, and she knew that they were plotting about her. This was the worst, because their discussions often spanned days and fragments of conversations, and every second she stayed eavesdropping was a greater chance that she'd get caught with no guarantees that she'd learn anything else of importance.

Tempted though she was to peek around the corner and check on them, she opted for extraction. With careful movements, she backed up into the kitchen. Once freed of the need to be quiet, she took a deep breath, let it out, squared her shoulders. Then, as if she had just finished the cleanup, she strode past the living room, not even sparing a glance in. If her parents noticed anything amiss, they didn't speak up. They didn't even call out to wish her good night.

Allison really did have a lot of homework to do, and she really did mean to do it. She opened the top book and lined up the pens, read over the chapter summary and located the next blank page in the notebook—and ended up staring at it, pen gripped tight between her fingers, without any clue what marks she was supposed to make on the page. She thoughts buzzed with the shreds she had overheard downstairs, with her boyfriend's name being spat from her mother's lips, and with her father's protestations about his sister.

Her hand started to shake.

She stared at it in confusion, unable to make sense of what it was doing or why. The pen dropped from her suddenly helpless fingers and landed on the paper. A blot of ink marked where it had hit, marring the other smooth spread of lined-white that was waiting to be written on and given a purpose, waiting to be filled. The first mark that complicated the whole plan. It could be worked around, but not easily. Not without lasting consequence.

All at once, the pieces of her parents' conversation came together.

Slowly, she stood up and crossed to her dresser. Her crossbow lay on top surrounded with scattered earrings and rings that hadn't made it back into her jewelry box. A bolt sat next to the weapon like another decoration. All of the items had been supplied by her parents, a spread of trinkets that summed up her whole identity and all she was supposed to desire. She was a girl, a daughter, and a hunter-in-training.

With one eye on the bolt, as if it would nock itself and shoot if she didn't stop it, she slid open the top drawer of her dresser and pulled out the strip of photographs from the other night at the ice rink when they snuck in after hours. Here was the rest of her identity: friend, girlfriend. Rule-breaker.

She held the strip up to the light. Her knees weakened at the memory of Scott's fingers tracing down her sides and sliding between her legs, of Scott's breath warm and moist as it gusted over her stomach.

The picture strip was more accurate than she could have imagined when the two posed for it with their silliest faces. There was Scott, the boy, who was her first love. The boy her parents had forbidden her from seeing, not caring that he was the one who saw her.

Shining from his eyes was the proof of Scott, the werewolf, whom her parents had kept alive only because they meant him to be her first kill.

END


End file.
